Tales from the front.

Time Is The Great Healer For A Failed Marriage

November 10, 1998|By Cheryl Lavin, Tribune Staff Writer.

There's something so exciting, so romantic about love at first sight, about knowing it's right, about having the guts to act on it, about taking risks, about holding your breath and jumping off the deep end. About getting married to a total stranger. Kelsey did it. She married Jack after dating him for only 5 1/2 months.

"I thought he was the one." Turned out, he wasn't. He began an affair 3 1/2 years after they married, just after she became pregnant with their third child. When she got wind of it, some months later, Kelsey gave him an ultimatum: Her or me. When he chose her, Kelsey left him. There she was with three children, ages 4, 3 and 9 months.

Kelsey attended a Divorce Recovery Seminar a few months after Jack was gone. She learned many things and she'd like to pass them on.

"One of the things they stressed was to take your time before getting back into the dating scene. First, be honest in assessing your own responsibility in the demise of your marriage. You can't do that when you're being starry-eyed with some new guy.

"Second, you need time to heal from the painful experiences you have just been through. We can use other people or other things to numb the pain, but no one else, or no other thing, can really make you whole again except yourself.

"Third, your children need time to recover. They may get along great with the other person's kids now, but often it's a different matter when you make it an official relationship. And right now, the kids are the priority.

"Most people would say they were being extraordinarily generous in giving people a year to recover, but grief can last years. Kids don't need their parents' attention diverted at the time of such great need. And you're fooling yourself if you think you can be as attentive as ever to them when you're dating."

At the seminar, it was suggested that newly divorced people should wait two years before dating again. If they can't wait that long, then maybe they need to look at why they can't be alone for a while for their own sake and the sake of others.

"Second marriages have a 75 percent divorce rate; third marriages a 90 percent failure rate," says Kelsey. "Would you want to be one of those statistics? But those numbers go down drastically when you've taken the time to heal and to be honest with yourself."

Because of the advice she received in her divorce seminar, Kelsey has chosen not to date anyone for three years. But, she says the sacrifice has been worth it.